Che Guevara: An emblem of freedom?

Let's excuse our intrepid "watchdog" MSM. They're too busy rummaging through Sarah Palin's garbage to report on the actual sayings and doings by our actual government officials. So here's a report from Britain's Guardian on a speech by Alec Ross, the U.S. State Department's senior advisor on innovation: "Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before," he proclaimed at the Innovate Conference in London this week. "One thesis statement I want to emphasize is how networks [the Internet] disrupt the exercise of power … because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual…the Internet has become the Che Guevara of 21st century."

Imagine the MSM snarkiness and uproar if somewhere in Sarah Palin's e-mail garbage bins they scrounged up an item where she equates Internet freedom with the co-founder of the regime that Freedom House rates as among the three most repressive on Earth against the Internet, where bloggers were being jailed and tortured for the crime of blogging while she wrote the message. Because, in fact, Cubans were being jailed and tortured for blogging while the U.S. State Department's senior advisor on "Internet freedom" hailed the Cuban regime's co-founder as the emblem of Internet freedom.

Imagine the media snarkiness and uproar if Sarah Palin claimed that "dictatorships are now more vulnerable" then equated the co-founder of the most enduring Stalinist dictatorship in modern history with the enemy of dictatorships.

Imagine the MSM uproar and snarkiness if Sarah Palin linked "the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual" with a man who worshipped Joseph Stalin, who signed his correspondence "Stalin II," who as chief KGB liaison for a Stalinist regime proclaimed that "Individualism must disappear! It is criminal to think in terms of individuals! Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates! Youth should learn to think and act as a mass." In a famous speech, Che Guevara even vowed "to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!"

I provide the following as a public service for any U.S. State Department officials reading The Daily Caller: Ernesto "Che" Guevara (the gentleman a senior U.S. State Department official hails as an emblem of freedom) was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that outlawed elections and private property. This regime's KGB-supervised police — employing the midnight knock and the dawn raid among other devices — rounded up and jailed more political prisoners per capita than Stalin's and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler's executed (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six.

The regime Che Guevara co-founded stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 percent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. Che Guevara's regime also shattered — through executions, incarceration, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Cuban regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period THREE TIMES as long in Che Guevara's Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin's Gulag.

Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara's admonitions were more than idle bombast. In Che Guevara, the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German Stasi "consultants" who flooded Cuba in the early 1960s found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid-'60s the crime of a "rocker" lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba's streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with "Work Will Make Men out of You" in bold letters above the gate and with machine-gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world's largest Che Guevara image adorns Cuba's headquarters and torture chambers for its KGB-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.

Imagine the MSM snarkiness and uproar if Sarah Palin, as an official of the U.S. Department of State, lauded a man who insulted the U.S. as "the Great Enemy of Mankind!" and her countrymen as "hyenas fit only for extermination!" and who openly craved to incinerate millions of them with a surprise nuclear attack. "If the missiles had remained," confided Che Guevara to The London Daily Worker in November 1962, "we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City."

Humberto Fontova holds an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University and is the author of four books, including Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant and Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. For more information and for video clips of his television and college speaking appearances, please visit www.hfontova.com.

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